Britain: Paying the wages of piracy

“We are fine. We are rather skinny and bony, but we are fine.” With those
words, Paul Chandler, 60, and his 56-year-old wife, Rachel, greeted the world this week, after being released from a 388-day hostage ordeal
 at the hands of Somali pirates, said Xan Rice in the London Guardian. The drama began after the couple, having taken early retirement, embarked on a world tour aboard their 38-foot yacht. In October 2009, 60 miles from the Seychelles port of Victoria, gunmen boarded their boat and forced the Chandlers to sail toward Somalia. A 
British supply vessel, the Wave Knight, with 25 Royal Navy sailors aboard later watched the couple being transferred to another ship but didn’t intervene, fearing a rescue attempt would put the Chandlers’ lives 
at risk.

For 13 months, the Chandlers were kept in a series of bases in Somalia—one of the most lawless countries on earth, said the London Daily Mail, while back 
in the U.K. their family frantically sought their release. In June, the family thought they’d reached a deal with the pirates, and $435,000 was dropped from a light aircraft; but it failed to win the couple’s freedom. Then another $550,000 was delivered, much of it raised by Somalia’s transitional
 government and by the Somali community in Britain. A key negotiator was reportedly a former minicab driver from Leytonstone, Kadir
 Hadiye, who is said to have experience brokering deals with Somali pirates.


The release of the Chandlers is excellent news, said the Glasgow Herald; the manner of it is not. It’s easy to understand why their loved ones would do everything possible to secure their release, but in paying a ransom, they have endangered the lives of others. The British government has long refused to pay kidnappers, said Member of Parliament David Davis in the London Times. But it should go further: It should insist that no ransoms be paid by anyone. “Payment of ransoms always looks less dangerous than the alternative military options, but in the long run it is far more hazardous.” It is humiliating that Royal Navy forces were obliged to stand by while British citizens were bundled at gunpoint onto a foreign ship.

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Still, this was no victory for the pirates, said David Jones in the Daily Mail. Once the cost of holding the Chandlers for a year is deducted, the operation won’t have been very profitable. Indeed, it’s questionable why they kidnapped the Chandlers in the first place. Pirates
 don’t usually target pleasure craft; it’s far more profitable to seize cargo ships, whose insurers are quick to pay ransoms. Only last week, a South Korean supertanker was released after a $9 million payment.
 More such incidents will follow, said Damian
 Whitworth in The Times. Policing the Gulf of Aden with navy warships, said one officer, is “like policing provincial France with
 three police cars.” Poor Somalis, most of whom live on less than a
 dollar a day, will continue to resort to maritime crime until their land is physically and economically secure. As one naval commander put it, “The solution is not at sea.”